back to basics

Have you ever wondered why steak or chicken tastes so delicious in a restaurant, and you try to recreate the dish at home, without much success? With the advent of nonstick cookware, we’ve lost the ability to make a delicious pan sauce. All of those little brown pieces that stick to the bottom of a stainless steel frying pan or roaster can be utilized in a pan sauce; those little brown bits are what give the sauce a great depth of flavor, a richness.

For a simple steak recipe, you’ll need two steaks (tenderloin or
New York strip will work wonderfully for this). While you prepare the steak, heat about a tablespoon of olive oil over medium-high heat in a stainless steel frying pan.

Brush both sides of the steaks with olive oil and season with salt and pepper. Just before the oil smokes, add the steaks to the pan and give it just a quick little horizontal shake. Now don’t touch it! Don’t be tempted to move the meat or peek; let it sit in the pan for about four minutes on the first side. With a tongs, see if you can easily lift the steak. If it sticks, let it be for another minute. When the steak is perfectly browned, it will release easily from the pan.

Flip the steaks over, give the pan a quick shake, and again, leave it alone for four minutes. While the steaks are searing, you can prepare what you need for your pan sauce. A simple sauce can be made from four sliced shallots, along with some beef broth, a little brandy or whisky (if desired), and a tablespoon of butter or cream.

After the four minutes is up, check on the steak. If the internal temperature is 130 F (this is between medium rare and medium), remove the steaks from the pan to a plate and cover with foil.

Add the sliced shallots to the pan and sauté until browned. Add a cup of beef broth and raise the temperature to high. Reduce the sauce by half and remove from the heat. Add about 1/3 c of brandy or whiskey (always add alcohol off-heat). At this point, you can either return the sauce to the stove to cook off the alcohol, or you can light it on fire to burn off the alcohol and enjoy the pretty flame. Personally, I like the burn it, because it puts on a show for my guests, but obviously there are risks involved when lighting your dinner on fire, so do take care.

Remove from heat. Add a tablespoon of butter and mix it into the sauce. Poor the pan sauce over the steaks. This is especially good served with crusty bread or potatoes to mop up the extra juices.

This dish is so good, you may never go to a restaurant again. Then again, that’s kind of the point! Learning a few restaurant-quality dishes to make at home can enrich your family life (assign everyone a kitchen task), and give you more time to linger over your meal. It’s cheaper, it’s healthier (you control what goes into the dish), and it’s more pleasant because there’s no couple at the next table, fighting.

Thus far, I’ve spent most of the day preparing food or shopping for food for tonight’s dinner. It took awhile to settle on a menu, but I’ve decided on broccoli with carmelized shallots, filet of beef au poivre with matchstick potatoes, a simple salad, and lemon pudding cakes. I made the lemon curd for the cakes this morning, and I’m quite excited to see how the rest of the dessert turns out.

In between cooking sessions, I have my homemade air freshener going (I need to humidify my condo!), and I’m about to take a small break to settle in with a book before I continue cooking and baking. Though this menu seems much easier than what I did last year, I realize that I am just getting much better at organizing and planning special dinners.

Tomorrow, bread pudding is on the menu. I admit, I’m cheating and not making homemade bread this time, but with everything else that’s going on (with tonight’s meal), sometimes a shortcut is necessary. Besides, I think the cinnamon bread I purchased will make a delicious bread pudding.

My Christmas holiday is officially over. The weather made travel a little tricky, and I ended up coming back home sooner than I expected (thanks to the upcoming weather this weekend), but it was great to see my family. It’s easy to get caught up in the commotion and pressure of the holidays, but after all was said and done, I realized that all I cared about was being able to spend time with my family. Does it really get any more basic than that?

My niece started crawling last week. We all enjoyed watching her crawl after my cat (though my cat didn’t appreciate it nearly as much!), as well as anything else that caught her attention. The gift baskets were well-received…I breathed a BIG sigh of relief after that!

Now that Christmas has passed, it’s time to start enjoying the new gifts…I have some exciting new kitchen supplies that I can’t wait to get my hands on!

Last night I sampled my bolognese. There was some leftover from the batch I made for gifts, and I wanted to accomplish two things by reheating some of the sauce for myself.

First, I wanted to make sure it tasted good! I followed Anne Burrell’s recipe (found on foodnetwork.com) instead of my own cooking method, so I wasn’t sure how things would end up tasting. I tried her recipe once before with not so good results. She indicated to heavily salt the dish in the first couple of steps, but the end result for me was that my pasta sauce tasted like a salt block. I had to throw it away.

This time, I seasoned the dish as I would season any other sauce I was making, and I was very pleased with the results. I will definitely make it again, because it’s a very versatile sauce (you can toss it with cooked noodles or with penne for a baked pasta). You have to figure that any sauce that cooks for 5-6 hours has to taste great!

The other reason I wanted to sample the sauce yesterday was so I could finish the instructions to include with the gift basket. This sauce is very, very thick. I needed to have an idea of how much pasta water would have to be retained, so I could properly instruct my family how to create their own dishes from this sauce.

I think they will be happy. I don’t see any of them ever making this on their own, but that’s okay - that’s what they have me for!

This year, the majority of the gifts I’m giving are homemade. I think there’s something special about gifts that cost time, as well as money. Granted, with Christmas less than a week away, I’m ready for it to be over, but that’s because I’ve done something everyday for the past 2+ weeks now, related to Christmas gifts.

 Will people care, or even know, how much time goes into these gifts? I don’t know, but that’s not really the point. Sure, there’s a part of me that hopes people know that I spent time on the gifts, because I wanted to make something for them, but a big part of this process is also for me.

I love making things for people, I love cooking for people. I love the concept of gift baskets, of giving several smaller gifts packaged as one large gift for a person or family. I’ve been busy making candies, cookies, bolognese, holiday fruit preserves, and finally, some holiday scones to round out the baskets. And though a part of me is a bit tired from working on this project every day, I’m also very, very excited to hand out the baskets.

When I was a little girl, my dad offered to make me some hot cocoa after I came in from playing in the snow. Never one to turn down hot cocoa, I of course said yes. I mean, I loved Swiss Miss with the little marshmallows; the more marshmallows, the better. Little did I know there was any other way of making hot cocoa.

Imagine my surprise when I saw my dad get out the milk, cocoa powder, sugar, and vanilla. As he started heating the milk on the stove, I looked on in both awe and confusion. When he poured me a mug of the cocoa, there was a skin on top of the milk that unnerved me a little. The taste was different, and I immediately asked if he could make me cocoa the way Mom did.

Of course, now I am quite ashamed, and a bit embarrassed, to admit that as a kid I preferred the heavily processed cocoa to the real deal. These days, I either make cocoa the way my dad taught me, or I’ll make hot chocolate by chopping up some bittersweet and a little milk chocolate, and whisking it in to my steamed milk. The taste is phenomenal, and every time I make it, it reminds me of the fun I had with my dad when I was a little kid, especially in the winter.

My dad was the best. He would get out the snowblower in the winter and built a sledding ramp in the backyard. Our house was the hotspot in the neighborhood, thanks to that ramp. And, though it took years before I would realize, my dad instilled in me an appreciation for homemade hot cocoa, rather than the powdered mix I usually had as a kid.

It’s so funny to look back on my time as a child and see how it’s influenced who I am now. With the hot cocoa, it certainly took a long time before I realized how much of a treat it was to have the real deal. I think perhaps in college is when I made it for myself the first time. Sorry Swiss Miss, but you can’t hold a candle to that steaming cup of creamy chocolate.

Last night I made the real thing. I was exhausted, I felt like I’d been hit by a truck, but it took no time at all to chop up a little chocolate and whisk it into milk I’d heated on the stove. I enjoyed my hot chocolate, and more importantly, that one mug of chocolate brought back childhood memories that will always lift my spirits.